Death Attitudes Survey

[Storm]

Yeah, I think so.

Ok.

 

[logician]

Of course there is a fear of dying, mainly, that you will miss out on the lives of your families, and the possible fear of nonexistence.

 

[Storm]

Of course there is a fear of dying, mainly, that you will miss out on the lives of your families,

The idea makes me sad, but that's not the same thing.

and the possible fear of nonexistence.

Nope. I don't think it'll happen, and it wouldn't bother me if I did.

 

[McBell]

That is not a fear,

Says who?

it would be a disappointment, certainly if we were alive to feel it.

For some it it is merely a disappointment.
For others it is an outright fear.

Your threshold of fear, would have to be very low to fear a disappointment.

Yet there are all manner of people who fear disappointment.

 

[Quagmire]

Death is God's way of saying, "I've changed my mind".

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

Says who?


For some it it is merely a disappointment.
For others it is an outright fear.
Yet there are all manner of people who fear disappointment.

To fear death and the disappointment of not seeing your children or grand children growing up is not normal behavior. To do so is fearing two things that are not imminent on the one hand and is only a potential on the other. None of us will see the future that follows our death, good or bad.

People who spend time fearing potential disappointments in life, will spend a lot of time in fear, and will be proved right on many occasions. However such people probably need help.

 

[Scarlett Wampus]

I don't think that, by and large, people fear the fact that they will die someday. I think that people fear death when its reality becomes possible. When people are in life and death situations, almost all of them experience fear. They don't want to die.

Absolutely. People can say they're not afraid of death but when they're faced with immanent death it can be a different thing altogether. Its built into our biology at a deep level. How people philosophically or religiously view death doesn't change that.

Pretty much the only way to be comfortable with it is to become accustomed to a sense of your immanent death.

 

[Scarlett Wampus]

It is the fear of Dying, not being dead, that frightens people.
To fear dying is instinctive. To fear death has to be thought about.

Personally I believe people have an inbuilt fear of non-being but its so deep its not something they feel consciously, even though they act it out in just about everything they do. Thinking about death barely touches it unless you're really really persistent.

The only way I've been able to uncover it in myself is through prolonged meditation (after getting the impression I was terminally ill) and very high doses of entheogens.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

I expect we all have had a frisson of fear in a really dangerous situation, or waiting to be told the results of a serious medical test. This causes an Adrenalin rush with really strong physical results.

We call this feeling fear. Though that instant passes, the causes of it may not, It seems to be a matter of temperament whether the fear persists in the form of morbid thoughts.

 

[Scarlett Wampus]

I expect we all have had a frisson of fear in a really dangerous situation, or waiting to be told the results of a serious medical test. This causes an Adrenalin rush with really strong physical results.

We call this feeling fear. Though that instant passes, the causes of it may not, It seems to be a matter of temperament whether the fear persists in the form of morbid thoughts.

Temperament?! Well I guess pretty much any reaction to any state of affairs could be put down to temperament.

I assert that people, in general almost all of us, have a strong fear of nothingness and fear of death is often intimately connected to that.

 

[logician]

The idea makes me sad, but that's not the same thing.


Nope. I don't think it'll happen, and it wouldn't bother me if I did.

I feel some fear if I feel I will miss out on my families' lives, of course it is the same.

Some people have great fear of nonexistence, the comedian Woody Allen talked about it a lot.

 

[Storm]

I assert that people, in general almost all of us, have a strong fear of nothingness and fear of death is often intimately connected to that.

On what grounds?

 

[Storm]

I feel some fear if I feel I will miss out on my families' lives, of course it is the same.

OK, so for you, it's fear. It's not for me. And no, fear and sorrow are not remotely the same thing.

Some people have great fear of nonexistence, the comedian Woody Allen talked about it a lot.

I'm not denying that some do. I don't.

 

[MysticSang'ha]

Why are you/aren't you afraid of dying?

How does religion play a role in your fear or lack of fear?

I can only speak for myself.

For years I thought I wasn't afraid until I faced my own death. When the reality of the situation hit me, I was overwhelmed with how attached I was to my ego. So I can see where SW is coming from.

But it also gave me the opportunity to have what could be called an "epiphany" when I made the decision where I was truly ready to die. When I came to that realization, fear was the furthest thing in my mind. All I can say is at that moment, everything and everyone in all realms of existence and phenomena were seen as absolutely beautiful.

I am coming to the 5-year anniversary of that epiphany next month, and it was then where I found many tools for comprehending it from my current practice in Tibetan Buddhism. The studies and meditation practices in my particular belief system is quite pronounced in understanding death and preparing for it.

Hope that helps, even if it is just a little.

 

[Scarlett Wampus]

On what grounds?

Nothingness is the antithesis of everything that we know – its the ultimate unknown or unknowing. Our whole world, the world that we regard as having meaning, familiarity, purpose, causation, consistency, etc. is a something. Nothingness is not a something or even a lack of a something – it is no-thing. It is where we can't go.

If we get to imagining what life would be like without meaning, without familiarity, without purpose, causation, consistency, etc. is a nightmarish idea – but then non-being, outside the bounds of our living existence which is all we know and have ever known, is an infinite 'without'.

That may seem like some silly philosophically created terror but if so, why does it scare people who get to thinking like that? Our most basic biological drive could be put as embracing what we like and rejecting what we dislike. Simply by virtue of having an identity we reject non-being (no matter how irrational non-being is). Its imprinted so completely in our minds that we rarely ever realise we're doing it unless we're confronted with non-being in a way that can breaks through our automatic rejection of it.

Some realise that rejection of non-being when reflecting on death. It can also come up not due to mortal death but the death of identity, i.e. the ego-death of prolonged meditation or the use of powerful entheogens. There are many reports of this, both of the fear that wells up prior to it and the liberation of release from it afterwards.

Consider this person's experience of using entheogens: The end of the rabbit hole - Beauty and Terror

I'll quote a few bits from their report:-

I've never not been before

Hey man.

Oh man. I'm gonna have a hard time pulling my ego out of this one.

I wanted something that showed me something like this, but faced with the void it fills me with unspeakable dread.

...

I shouldn't say it was trying to kill me - it was nothing personal. It was just showing me the true nature of existence, and in the process myself could no longer logically exist. Strange to realize that from every possible angle you do not logically exist, and to realize this with absolute clarity and certainty. Layer by layer, I was deconstructed. I tried to just exist and vibrate with the intense vibration in my body, but then even that sensation of vibration was shown to be unreal.

Layer by layer, reality was stripped bare, to the bone. Exposed. I scrambled for a foothold, anything, for a frame of reference, but inevitably, that too was revealed to me a part of the pattern. Continually, the only conclusion I was able to come to was that my 'self' isn't real; it's just some dream in nothing-land. In reality, there is no 'me', and no time, and no anything at all. Essentially, I've experienced what it is to be god - the infinite, and I've been subjected to the root. We are all part of everything, and everything is the same as nothing.

I think I discovered the root cause of every neurotic issue that people can have. It's all from a very primal fear of 'non-being'.

...

So I finally experienced an ego death. Man, it was painful. I didn't know I could die on so many levels; I feel that a part of me is gone because of this. I truly had to let go of myself, and that was profound. I had almost constant worries about losing my 'self', that I'd misplace it somewhere in this raging current of flows and be completely unable to find my way back. Is that how people go insane, I wondered? Am I going to be a vegetable? I reached the point where, aside from the continuing visual stimulation I had, I truly believed that I had ceased to exist. My mind had come to the logical conclusion of unbeing so profoundly that I knew of no way that I could not know about it, be aware of it, and that would be that my self as I knew it was no more. The two states of mind were not mutually exclusive.

...

I didn't even know it was possible to get so far out of the rabbit hole. I'd only ever gotten as far as the god-energy, the oneness. But this time, I saw beyond even that, into a vast nothingness that I can't even conceive of, a timeless place. I saw that even god, even the lifeforce, all of existence, is just a dream, a blip in the eye of an even larger pattern... and so it goes. It seemed that I was offered a glimpse to what lies at the heart of EVERYTHING, even life itself. And it was absolutely TERRIFYING.

 

[Storm]

Nothingness is the antithesis of everything that we know – its the ultimate unknown or unknowing. Our whole world, the world that we regard as having meaning, familiarity, purpose, causation, consistency, etc. is a something. Nothingness is not a something or even a lack of a something – it is no-thing. It is where we can't go.

If we get to imagining what life would be like without meaning, without familiarity, without purpose, causation, consistency, etc. is a nightmarish idea – but then non-being, outside the bounds of our living existence which is all we know and have ever known, is an infinite 'without'.

Not really. If I cease to exist, I won't know I'm without anything. Your description is dependent on being aware, which contradicts the premise.

Maybe the real problem is that you just can't wrap your mind around the idea of not existing?

That may seem like some silly philosophically created terror but if so, why does it scare people who get to thinking like that?

That's just it: it DOESN'T scare me. I can accept that it scares you, the why doesn't really concern me. Why can't you accept that it doesn't scare everyone?

Consider this person's experience of using entheogens: The end of the rabbit hole - Beauty and Terror

The fact that someone had a bad trip does nothing to persuade me.

 

[Scarlett Wampus]

Ah. Oh well. I was fully expecting rejection both of what I was suggesting and that anything could be surmised from use of entheogens.

 

[Storm]

Ah. Oh well. I was fully expecting rejection both of what I was suggesting and that anything could be surmised from use of entheogens.

Could that possibly be because your argument and the generalization it supported were flawed?

I have to say, I'm not impressed by your implication that I'm just not considering what you say.

 

[Scarlett Wampus]

Could that possibly be because your argument and the generalization it supported were flawed?

I have to say, I'm not impressed by your implication that I'm just not considering what you say.

No, I think you're considering what I said and you were clearly responding to it as such. There is good reason to see it as silly to talk about non-being since it would seem impossible to be aware of something that by definition is not within the bounds of knowable existence.

You asked me to accept that death/non-being doesn't scare you. I can give you a maybe. Its definitely possible.

Could you give me a maybe if I said you wouldn't understand what I was getting at unless you were trained in deep meditation or had undergone a dramatic ego-death from something like the use of entheogens?

 

[Storm]

No, I think you're considering what I said and you were clearly responding to it as such. There is good reason to see it as silly to talk about non-being since it would seem impossible to be aware of something that by definition is not within the bounds of knowable existence.

:sorry1:

You asked me to accept that death/non-being doesn't scare you. I can give you a maybe. Its definitely possible.

OK.

Could you give me a maybe if I said you wouldn't understand what I was getting at unless you were trained in deep meditation or had undergone a dramatic ego-death from something like the use of entheogens?

I would consider it pretentious, even if I didn't meet your qualifications.

I'm not convinced either way about entheogens. Even if they do work, they strike me as... well, cheating. Taking a shortcut to things you're not ready to handle.